Matthew Travers

“We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit. We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“I was thinking about how free of mobs recent centuries had been: to create a mob there must be public meetings, and public meetings in our time consisted of individuals communing via the All Thing or other datasphere channels; it is hard to create mob passion when people are separated by kilometers and light-years, connected only by comm lines and fatline threads.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion